MONA - WHERE ART AND LIFE COLLIDE

I turned 50 a few days back.  It was a big birthday.  For months I had been preparing.  Cleaning out my studio. Cleaning out my life.  Getting ready for the second half of the journey.  As my celebration I decided to visit MONA in Hobart. We stayed in a Pavilion and booked a 5 course degustation menu for the celebratory dinner.  An absolute treat.

 

We arrived by ferry on the morning of my birthday.  My dear friend Cate and her husband Philip came with Rob and I. As the birthday girl I received a glass of champagne on the boat.

We had a coffee and croissant and then took the journey into another universe. The museum is built into a cliff and you can walk or take a lift down into the bowels of the earth. 

The Red Queen exhibition was showing.

 

The first thing I see is an installation of light globes where you can hold a sensor that registers your heart beat and the light displays the rhythm of your heart.  I have had two coffees, a champagne and I am excited about being 50 and in MONA.  My heart is beating fast.

 I walk past two table tennis tables.  One has grooves cut into it and makes a game of table tennis virtually futile.  The ball gets caught in the grooves or bounces off at crazy angles.  Cate and I play and enjoy the hilarity of this encounter.  People say we are glad you tried this as we wanted to see what happened. I note that some people do not engage despite a tempting invitation to take up a table tennis bat. Some people observe while others experience.

 We continue and I walk through a corridor of red velvet curtains to enter a gallery of confronting artworks.  Transgender people, human pain and suffering, death, sex and gunshot wounds confront me.

 I am taking photos and listening to the commentaries. I sit down on a comfortable, lived in couch to discover I am in front of Philip Nietsche's euthanasia machine.  I feel sick as I give my approval via a laptop to be injected with a lethal injection. I experience what it must be like to make that decision.  The program tells me when the chemical enters my brain, when I will be unconscious, when my breathing stops and tells me I am dead.  Confronting art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I continue to immerse myself in art that is disturbing to say the least. I feel normal here as my art often disturbs.  I am loving this space of creativity and social commentary. I continue on and find an interesting installation. The viewer is invited to pull out drawers on a wall.  Each drawer says "I love you" in a different voice.  Children, lovers, men, women with different voices and auditory tones change the emphasis and intonation on those three simple words.  I get overexcited and pull out 12 drawers and there is a cacophony of people all telling me they love me.  A narcissist's dream. I laugh and show my friend Cate.  Cate is a serious art person and is often subdued in a gallery.  I take a short film of her opening the drawers taking note of her reactions.  She is curious and smiles.  She engages with this art object. She is having fun.

Suddenly I realise that MONA focuses on giving the audience an experience through sensory engagement. While there is an adequate supply of two dimensional art, there is an abundance of three dimensional sculpture and installations.  The viewer is invited to touch.  The touch seems to invite play - even with death.

It is a gallery that appeals to our senses.  Sight, touch, sound and smell (particularly the installation called Cloaca that mimics our digestive system and creates shit.  The exhibit stinks and people do not linger here I notice).

Taste is missing however in this gallery.  Mind you there is an abundance of cafes, restaurants, bars so that you can sit in amongst art and taste gorgeous things (macarons, Vietnamese salads, coffee, alcohol are some of the things I sample). I think to myself wouldn't it be fascinating to create an art object that could be eaten.  I imagine it won't be long before someone tries it.  I wonder if the curators have thought about this sensory experience for the visitors.  Have they chosen art that deliberately engages the audience with different senses. That would be interesting to find out.

I jot down the phrase, "Reality and art are blurred here.  Life and art interact and it is hard to know where one ends and the other begins.' I ponder the wonders around me.

My phone starts to vibrate and I am jolted from the depths of my thoughts.  It is time to check in to the Walter Pavilion (as in Walter Burley Griffin the architect) and I take the lift back to the surface and consciousness....oh hell I have just turned 50. 

 

 

THE WISDOM OF MY HANDS

WHAT HELPED ME TO EXPRESS MY EMOTIONS?

The studio space:

I was fortunate when my Auntie died that I was attending a week long art retreat.  The tutor had established a productive space where there was minimal interruptions.  Beyond showing us how to use our pig casings we were free to explore and play.  The group was very committed to their art practise and there were small breaks to chat but overall the atmosphere was quiet and reflective. There was an abundance of natural materials, a workshop environment with enough space to spread out.

The nature of the materials: 

The pig casings were a slightly disturbing material even before I went to visit my Auntie.  I found myself thinking about whether the material was living or dead.  I came to the conclusion that it had indeed been living and that the intestines were the flesh of dead animals preserved in brine.  I had thoughts of medical museums with specimen jars of body parts preserved in formalin.  The pig casings have a slight smell that reminded me of death.  It was ever so slight but unmistakably present.  The casings looked like white worms which was not attractive.  My first reaction to touching them was not pleasant – disturbing - as they were wet, soft and stretchy.  To prepare them they needed to be rinsed with water which needs to be run through the intestine.  This bloats the material and they start to look like giant sausages.  There was quite a bit of hilarity and an enjoyment that came with running water through the casings.  Once rinsed I was taught to put my finger into the casing, make a cut in the wall and then slide my thumb though to open them up.  In using the casings there is a slight resistance but it stretches extensively.  It adheres to itself and so is less messy than other materials as there is no need for glue.  The thinning out of the casings produces a translucent skin that is tough but delicate.  Parts of the intestine have an organic lace like composition which is visually interesting however this is lost when it dries.   There seemed to be a tendency to want to cover things or join pieces together to make larger pieces of gut.  Once dried it is brittle and hard.  I made one piece of art where I draped casings over a branch and dried it upside down.  In turning the branch up when the intestines were dry the extensions stood firm and upright as if in defiance of gravity.  The material shrinks quite extensively and can distort the structure it is placed on.  The smell is not discernible when dry.  Although our tutor described an incident where a dog ate a piece of her work at an exhibition suggesting that the smell does not disappear completely!

 

Death was on my mind after visiting my Auntie. The pig casings were from a dead animal.   The smell of the material reminded me of death.  It’s skin like qualities were able to represent the fragile and taut skin of my Auntie in her final days.  What better material to express my concerns.

I used wire to create a skeleton.  I enjoyed the resistance of both the skin and wire.  I was symbolically wrestling with strong emotions as well as my materials.  It captured the difficulty of my experience.  I repetitively wound the wire which felt rhythmical and soothing.  It calmed me.  Yet the resulting figure was full of energy – alive.  There was a  sense of tension created by the distinctly human figure created from inanimate materials such as computer wire.  Wrapping the casings around the wire gave me a sense of being able to contain the foreign nature of the wire so that the figure became more human.  This too echoed the tension I felt as I saw my Auntie’s physical body in the process of shutting down and becoming inanimate flesh.  Her familiar loving features were changing and becoming unrecognisable in a body that was dying.

 

 

The knowledge of my hands: 

While the material lends itself to three dimensional artmaking by adhering  to a skeleton or frame it requires a sense of touch.  To work with the casings it required the fine movements of the fingers to stretch the tissue.  My fingertips did much of the work and it was satisfying to encase objects within a skin.  My hands knew how to symbolically contain my swirling emotions. My feelings were quite overwhelming and difficult to contain or understand.  I made a conscious decision to allow my hands to take over and express my emotions.  I did not 'think' about making a wire figure.  Instead I picked up the wire and began to play with it. I enjoyed the sense of resistance and the repetitive wrapping movements.  Before very long I saw a human shape appearing. Once I recognised a human shape I consciously developed it.  I had no thoughts of who or what this figure would be or do at the time.  When I was satisfied with the form, I took a break and looked around me at the materials I had.  I knew instinctively that I wanted to make the form more human and encased it in pig casings.  After this I picked up a hank of silk strips and simply began to wrap the body. There was little cognitive thoughts but more an intuitive knowledge in my hands.  Once the figure was shrouded in silk, I bound the arms and feet.  The skin had dried and in the process of bending the legs and arms, the skin would crack.  This was disturbingly reminiscent of bones cracking and the feel was of stiffness similar to rigor mortis in a human body.  My hands kept working and there was only the occasional intellectual thought during this process. 

The life like nature of three dimensional form:

The wrapping of the figure reminded me of participating in death rituals  –  touching, caring and loving  people in life as well as death.  I was unable to do this for my Auntie in her final days. However I could do this in a symbolic way using my art.  I was able to keep my Auntie in mind and enact a ritual for her that I found both comforting and healing.  I cared for her bodily remains  and  I was able to face and accept her impending death.

My hands wanted the figure to be in a foetal position.  It’s tiny size meant that I could cradle it poignantly in my hand.  Or perhaps this was a reflection of my grief and wanting to curl myself into a foetal position?   Perhaps it was a reference to death being intimately related to birth.  I felt that giving birth connected me to the essence of life.  Likewise being present at my father’s death also connected me to the essence of life.  I coined a phrase in a story I wrote after my sister and I laid out his body – I felt we were midwives of the dead.  We cared for and helped transition our father out of the world just as a midwife helped  to bring my own children into the world.

I had made the cane tower earlier in the week before visiting my Auntie.  I had struggled with the material to create a structure with a pleasing shape.  I had thoughts of aboriginal fish traps during the process.  I had sat this 'fish trap' on my work table and many of my fellow artists had asked me what I was going to do with it.  I had no idea except I knew something significant needed to be inside the structure.  Once I had completed my little figure, I intuitively placed the object in the trap.  This was to see if it would fit and I was curious how it would look. 

 

I stepped back to look  at what I had created.I saw a fragile and lonely corpse lying bound and foetus-like at the base of a trap. I felt my body react.  Tears welled in my eyes and the familiar felt sense of disturbance in my 'guts' hit me again.  The figure had been shrouded and wrapped in silk evidencing a profound human connection of love and respect.  At the same time it appeared alone, constricted and unmoving encased in a trap where there was no escape.     Unknowingly my hands had expressed my conflicting emotions and painful realisation that no-one escapes death.  It is a fate that awaits us all.

LETTING MY HANDS DO THE WORK

Following the visit to my Auntie, I created artwork to deal with the difficult emotions that were swirling around inside me.  The following is a record of the inspiration, the materials and the process with photos of the resulting artworks. I allowed my hands to do the work.

 Examples of work using pig casings by Pat Hickman

The materials I had at hand were in an art retreat run by artist Pat Hickman who works with pig casings or sausage skins.  Here are some examples of Pat's work.

Example of Pat Hickman work

Example of Pat Hickman work

 

The material - Sausage skins

Sausage skins soaking and ready to use





Resulting artwork


The process

Figure created out of wire

Figure wrapped in pig casings



Figure wrapped in fleece





First figure completed

Figure wrapped in silk, bound in foetal position

Viewing artwork from the top

Cane structure which was build earlier houses figure

Figure encased in cane - close up

Second figure completed

Figure created in same way and placed in a hand sewn fibre cocoon

Third figure completed

Figure created in the same way and designed to sit up

Figure placed in boat with natural materials